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Nachdem ich immer wieder gefragt werde, wieso "wir" Naturschützer das MPI des Lichts in Erlangen nicht wollen, möchte ich für etwas Erleuchtung sorgen. Denn, die Aussage, wie gerne sie auch unterstellt oder in den Mund gelegt wird, ist so falsch. Das wäre genauso, als würden "wir" Naturschützer sagen, der Balleis oder der Stadtrat wollen Natur zerstören. Beides sind haltlose Unterstellungen, die allemal von billigen Stimmungsmachern genutzt werden. Daher - gleich zu Beginn: Niemand ist gegen das MPI, nur viele sind gegen den jetzigen Bauplan. Jeder hat seine Gründe, viele dieser Gründe sind ähnlich. Daher gibt es z.B. überhaupt eine Bürgerinitiative. Jeder, der ernsthaft verstehen will, was hier los ist, kann nun gerne weiterlesen. Die Berufs-Ignoranten können jetzt einfach aufhören zu lesen und weiter versuchen durch ihre Falschaussagen zu polarisieren. Wir sind eine Demokratie, und es besteht das Recht der freien Meinungsäusserung. Es gibt nicht nur aus naturschut...

Hier einmal ein Beitrag, der rein gar nichts mit Apple zu tun hat... sondern meine Erfahrungen und Eindrücke einer politischen Veranstaltung in Erlangen widerspiegelt. Es handelt sich dabei um meine eigene und freie Meinung. Wer die aktuelle Politik in Erlangen (eine kleine Stadt in Nordbayern, nahe Nürnberg) verfolgt, hat sicher die Diskussion um den Bau eines Max-Planck-Instituts (Physik des Lichts) und die dadurch bedingte "Zerstörung" wertvoller Flächen mitbekommen. In einer Veranstaltung am 9.2. gab die Stadt, die Universität und die MPG Bürgern die Möglichkeit sich hierzu zu äußern - ach ja, der eigentliche Auftraggeber (staatliches Bauamt) war auch da. Vorne weg wurde vom Oberbürgermeister Ba. und dann vor allem von seinem Mitarbeiter Br. dargelegt, wieso die Planung überhaupt gar nicht anders gemacht werden könne. Das widerspricht natürlich einem offenen Dialog, wie ihn die Stadt von sich aus versprochen hat. Denn liegt so ein festes Bild vor, das zu Beginn als nicht-...

For the version 2 of bcAnalyze I am digging much deeper into CoreAudio to be able to do some of the things I have planned. The first that bcAnalyze does when it encounters an AudioFile is reading its data into an internal SInt16 buffer. ExtAudioFileRead works well for that if the file format is wav, mp3, aiff or one of the other known formats. While version 1 of bcAnalyze asks the user which channel to read, I decided to overcome this limitation. Still, the UI should only display and work with one channel, but the user should be able to switch between left/right for display and such. Simple solution, tell ExtAudioFileRead to read the stereo data into two buffers, one for each channel. Setting the proper client format was simple. For my purpose the internal format / client formatFlag is set: clientFormat.mFormatFlags = (!kAudioFormatFlagIsBigEndian | kAudioFormatFlagIsSignedInteger | kAudioFormatFlagIsPacked | kAudioFormatFlagIsNonInterleaved); Then, whenever I tried to read a stereo fi...

This is a First Test to blog from my New iPad. While it is for most users nothing but an Advanced Gaming Device with a nice touch, I see good use for it in my daily work. Already after a couple of days I do my news reading and tweeting preferably on the iPad. RSS Feeds are synched via my GoogleReader account by Feeddler. It integrates really well all those tasks in my daily rhythm, yet, I assume it can do much more. I plan to try sketching, GTD and note taking (especially for developing ideas) to do mainly on the iPad in the Next weeks. What I already dislike a lot is how hard it is to manage the iPad App store. Finding good apps is hard and expensive. Instead of having a trial period, you'll have to pay quite some squids to test drive apps. Often to find that the app is just not what I need. this truly has to improve if the iPad should once replace netbooks or laptops. And: tipping in english while the iPad is set to german is a pain.

For my business mailing list needs I started to use MailChimp. had to work with it a couple of years ago and decided to not roll my onw stuff. First struggle was to get my AddressBook (Thanks Apple, no CSV export) into a list there. Thanks for all spammers who made me click a couple of times that someone wants to get listed. Yes. Of course. By written request. Show ya. Now, next thing was to write an actual newsletter and send it through the service. Mailchimp offers a rather large number of templates. While I have enough html knowledge and experience to do an html newsletter my self, I decided to focus on contents and all the rest. Thus, one of the templates was fine for me this time. So, now content is written, campgain is set up... and I just have to dare to send... will keep you updated.

SnowLeopard introduced a new feature called Blocks. I know, I am lagging behind a bit, but my users still run 10.4 (some, few only), and mainly 10.5. So I had no real need to learn all the new stuff the first day I had a SL version running. Now I am playing around with all that. While I see its power in general, I see also many scenarios in modern apps that will make life hard when using blocks - or at least larger blocks. For example bcAdmin 2 uses CoreData quite a lot in the background. Many tasks that are computation intensive (finding bat calls) will regularly access a ManagedObjectContext. Haven't played around with it, but knowing of how fragile that gets when using threads manually, I fear some of my ideas will just not work out as I expect leaving my CD stack/context in a mess. :-(

My main occupation throughout the last quarter of 2009 was bcAdmin 2.0. While having some feedback by users, the main goal was not only to implement these feature requests but also make the under-workings more stable and expandable. While I think I managed to do that quite well, I also found man new problems after I thought all design and coding was more or less finished. For one thing, you not only learn when learning, but mainly learn when using the things you exercised before. Especially for CoreData I have to admit that one needs a couple of try/error cycles to get through to the inner workings. While I am now 90% content with what I have managed, still some minor things will be tweaked to bcAdmin 2.1 or so. Even more so, I have to admit, that SnowLeopard improved many things in that field. While I have to stick at least for now to 10.5 support, I would love to move on to support 10.6 only. Just for all the benefits in CoreData alone. Apart from re-doing all the inner workings I al...